TIME MAGAZINE'S JOE KLEIN CALLS OUT DOBBS FOR DEMAGOGUERY

And this is from the star columnist at the news magazine owned by CNN's parent company, Time Warner. Here's the post:

Given the amount of serious journalism going on at CNN--the reporters risking their lives on battlefields all over the world, fine journalists like John King and Candy Crowley working to report the presidential campaign accurately, the excellent fact-checking that Wolf Blitzer did earlier this year on the Obama Madrasa smear--given all that and a nearly thirty year history of really trying to present the facts straight...I've got to wonder why the network allows Lou Dobbs to continue spewing false, inflammatory nonsense under the guise of objective journalism.

Here is his latest confrontation with Paul Waldman of Media Matters about the fictional NAFTA superhighway. Indeed, the Washington Post's Fact Checker gave the NAFTA Superhighway myth four Pinocchios.

Now, I know that Dobbs brings in some serious ratings. And he is certainly entitled to his own opinion. But he is not entitled to his own facts--especially not on a network that makes a real effort to separate truth from falsehood and represent all sides of the political debate. Shouldn't someone be editing this swill? Doesn't CNN have a responsibility to tell its viewers that, in this case, one of their presenters is engaged in flat-out anti-immigrant fearmongering? Perhaps the network could employ a simple superimposed title--THIS IS NOT TRUE...or LOU HAS JUMPED THE SHARK ON THIS ONE--whenever Dobbs pretends that there is such a thing as the NAFTA Superhighway. This sort of thing diminishes the credibility and hard work of the other journalists on the network. (And no, I do not count the execrable Glenn Beck as a journalist.)

Comments

[Jack]

'Our population needs to approach that of China & India in order for us to retain our place in the global economy. The only way we get to that point is by actively recruiting more people to immigrate to the US.'

I am not of that view but I appreciate when people who favor higher immigration (and higher U.S. population) give a number. Too often when immigration is debated, the most fundamental issue of all (how a policy will affect the population over time) fails to come up.

[USC]

Here's the context you left out:

"But as a New Yorker, I'm deeply grateful to the immigrants, many of them illegal, who saved the city by bringing commerce (and sales tax revenues) to some of the toughest neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s."

I am a New Yorker as well. I am active as an investor in commercial real estate. Many neighborhoods in NYC (Jackson Heights, Corona, Flushing, Richmond Hill, most of the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn. On Manhattan's now trendy Columbus Avenue you couldn't give away real estate) were drug and crime invested. These new immigrants turned these neighborhoods around. I have named the neighborhoods so that you can do your own research.

Our population needs to approach that of China & India in order for us to retain our place in the global economy. The only way we get to that point is by actively recruiting more people to immigrate to the US.

[kthiru]

Nice one from Joe Klein

[Jack]

"I tend to be an extremist on this issue. I am wildly in favor of immigration, legal and illegal." -- Joe Klein

http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/10/the_gop_in_2008_1.html

Media Matters and others shouldn't dismiss all NAU issues in light of Vicente Fox's book in which he admits proposing to Bush and Chretien a continental union modeled on Europe.

[A Nony Mouse]

At this point I think we can safely put Lou Dobbs on par with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie in "The Simple Life" - namely, that it should come with a disclaimer that some events have been staged for the purposes of entertainment.

(If only that were the case...)